Welcome To The Hermit's Desk

I woke at 9:30 AM. Much later than usual, but I'd been hoping to stretch it to noon. I'd gone to bed terribly late and about an hour after, Jesse became violently ill. So I gathered a blanket, a bottle of cold water, and some crackers and sat with him on the floor, wastebasket in hand should he throw up, until he felt better enough to crawl back into bed.

I must have gone back to bed around 4 AM. Sleep, as it ebbs and wanes, is such an unpredictable creature. Tempestuous and mercurial.

It is another day of wondering why the hell I write. Over the last two years, my journal has become far less of a discussion and more a scream into the void. Nothing but temper tantrum after temper tantrum.

I've lost energy to directly reply to comments, which isolates me even further, as I know that public journaling requires giving direct replies to those who are willing to speak to me.

I grieve that and can only hope, as time goes on, I can go back to what my LJ once was: A real conversation between all of us.

I also feel bad for my kitties. I often toss them off of me (most of them are pretty cuddly) because my joints can't handle even the slightest extra pressure. Even when my joints CAN, there's often GI or skin sensitivities to consider. Their favorite place to lie down is on my chest or stomach. So as I'm wishing for their contact, I'm pushing them towards my legs to lay down there, petting them the whole way.

Cats, despite their reputation, are not nuanced creatures. Talk about giving them mixed messages. Yeeeesh.

I've run out of Hydrocodone to deal with the migraine pain. And as the medical field is now paranoid of turning patients into junkies, I can't get more until my official dr appointment, days away. The blood pressure meds do drive the pain downward - significantly - but it doesn't take the pain away enough to be functional. I can also take only so many of the blood pressure meds and am SOOO NOT WILLING to take the chance of messing more with them. I have no one around me that either has extra Hydros or would be willing to give me extra Hydros.

A friend of Jesse's gave me a few pills called Propoxyphene. It's opiate based. I don't do so well on opiates. They usually make me horribly ill. But I'm willing to do almost anything to relieve the pain right now. The FDA had discontinued the med due to heart arrhythmia being a possible side efffect. I'm not worried. Every goddamn medication I'm on lists "heart arrhythmia" as a possible side effect. Hell, Tylenol lists that a possible side affect.

It seems to be taking care of the pain. I've also no need to violently hurl up stomach bile, as is usually the case with opiates. But just the sheer NUMBER of pills I take a day does a number on my stomach. If things are going well, perfectly, absolutely, well, then the pills just settle in and I'm fine.

Throw off any other part of my system, though, and I'm unable to do anything but moan about in bed. This body is fragile. So fragile and far more connected to its various operating systems than I ever knew.

God, if I could go back in time and bitchsmack myself for every time I joked that I was immortal. And maybe I AM immortal (so far, so good), but it's the kind of immortal that Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn had in the movie "Death Becomes Her". Where being immortal does not necessarily include a functional body to BE immortal IN.

And really, if your body parts are falling off, what's the point of being immortal anyways?

Bitch, moan, complain, complain. It's a sure enough sign that I'm at least clear enough TO be able to bitch about things. But I get tired of it just as much as anyone else around me does.

But I have no filter and even if I did, would never use it on LJ. This is the place for bitching. As much as my writing is for others, it's still a continuance of what I've always done: write for myself, to untangle it all, to keep record of it all, to try and find some box I can at least temporarily place all the bullshit in.

Thank you, mother, for the burning of all my journals over 20 years ago. You burning an effigy of me helped me realize I was someone important enough to even BUILD an effigy to burn. It's twisted. It was nothing short of heartbreaking and enraging. It still stings today.

But goddamnit, it proved to me that I should keep writing, no matter what that writing is about.

Writing when being chronically sick can also be a help in tracking down developments over a longer time episode. It may not be of use for now, but after months or a year, you can draw a guideline what is the general picture of things and what is the picture if things create an acute development.Call it "collecting and gathering experiences". The phrases on the paper are a longer-lasting note than sheer memories.

As I recall Propoxyphene was withdrawn from the EU and UK because of concerns over it's safety, and studies that showed it was no more effective a painkiller as bog standard over the counter paracetamol... let me check...

Yep:

In November 2007, the European Commission requested the European Medicines Agency (EMA) to review the safety and effectiveness of dextropropoxyphene based medicines and on 25 June 2009 the EMA recommended a gradual withdrawal throughout the European Union. The EMA's conclusion was based on evidence that dextropropoxyphene-containing medicines were weak painkillers, the combination of dextropropoxyphene and paracetamol was no more effective than paracetamol on its own, and the difference between the dose needed for treatment and a harmful dose (the "therapeutic index") was too small